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Sports Guy reads USSM – kind of

If the server goes down this afternoon, blame Bill Simmons. He’s the most widely read columnist on ESPN.com, and, because he owns Felix Hernandez in one of his fantasy baseball leagues, found my post on charting Felix and threw us a link in his column today.

(As you know, he’s the shining light of my AL-only fantasy team, so watching him struggle for these first two months has almost been like watching a son flounder in Little League. But my co-owner Hench and I found solace in an incredible site called USSMariner.com, where the blogger charts the pitches in Felix’s starts and has a whole theory about how new Japanese catcher Kenji Johjima has completely screwed up Felix by calling too many first-pitch fastballs (and not enough changeups). Not since Julia Roberts in “The Pelican Brief” has there been a random memo this on target. It’s unbelievable. Now I’m resisting the urge to fly to Seattle and slice one of Johjima’s hamstrings.)

The link was nice of him. However, you can’t really take anything else in the paragraph seriously. Simmons is a comedy writer who uses sports as his setup for punchlines. The post mentioned that Johjima “should have made an adjustment”, which Simmons turned into “completely screwed up Felix”. Why? Because it setup the Julia Roberts and the slashed hamstring joke a lot better if Johjima was the villain.

But, to ward off any questions, no, I don’t think Johjima is the sole source of Felix’s problems. It’s an organizational thing.